Brother MFC-J985DW XL Work Smart All-in-One Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

If you’ve followed our printer reviews at all over the past few years, you may have noticed that Computer Shopper has conducted a somewhat informal campaign railing against the cost of consumables: ink for inkjet printers, and toner for laser and laser-class/LED-based machines. We have no way of telling how much influence our ruminations and protestations on the subject have had, but there’s no denying that the cost of using printers, especially inkjet ones, has gone down.

Over the past couple years, three of the leading inkjet-printer makers—HP, Epson, and Brother—have developed and instituted new ink-delivery systems to lower the cost of using each company's printers, in terms of the per-page cost of consumables. The systems are called Instant Ink, EcoTank, and INKvestment, respectively. Plus, each printer maker, in its own way, has come up with a program to save you money when buying ink. As you’ll see as you read on, Brother’s INKvestment program offered in today’s review unit, the $299.99-list MFC-J985DW XL Work Smart All-in-One, is by far the most straightforward of the three—and one of the least expensive over time.

With Epson printers, on the other hand, only printers fitted from the factory with the EcoTank hardware can employ the EcoTank system. The WF-R4640 is one, with receptacles for hanging huge 20,000-page bags of ink. The other three current EcoTank models, which (like today’s Brother review unit) are designed for much lower volume, come with refillable tanks attached to the right side of the chassis. Of these models, the $499.99-MSRP WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank All-in-One is probably closest in price, features, and capacity to today’s Brother review unit.

As with Epson’s EcoTank, this INKvestment printer comes with "two years" worth of ink, or in this case ink for 7,200 black-and-white prints or 3,600 color prints. What that works out to is 300 monochrome pages per month, or about 10 pages per day (based on a 30-day month). But what’s more important here is the actual cost of those pages. The primary difference between the INKvestment and EcoTank systems is that Epson has designed the printers to allow them to hold more ink in oversize bags or reservoirs, while Brother has simply included additional cartridges in the box, and lowered the prices of replacement ink cartridges overall.

As you’ll see in the Setup, Cost Per Page, and Paper Handling sections later on, as with EcoTank, with INKvestment you pay considerably more on a per-page basis for the first round of ink—here, the 12 cartridges included in the box—than you do for subsequent ones. In fact, as we'll break out later, the per-page cost of the replacement inks is one of the lowest we’ve seen, especially if you print a lot of color.

Keep in mind, though, that this is a relatively low-volume printer. You can’t push tens of thousands of pages through it each month, no matter how cheap the ink is. As you’ll see in the Design & Features section next, it’s just not designed for heavy volume output of any type.

One more thing to keep in mind as we go through this review is that Brother also offers a non-"XL" version of the MFC-J985DW, at a $199.99 list price. It doesn’t come with three sets of ink cartridges, though. Instead, it comes with one set of the XL tanks, and you can buy additional ones for quite cheap—inexpensive enough to provide the same cost-per-page (CPP) figures as the XL model. As you’ll see in the Cost Per Page section later in this review, purchasing the non-XL model may be more economical for some buyers.

In either case, this is a good low-volume printer with a great CPP. As we’ve said a few times about EcoTank, though, INKvestment (especially if you go with the more-expensive XL model) makes sense only if you print enough to justify the higher purchase price.

Design & Features

A primary difference between this INKvestment printer and the others mentioned above is that essentially, other than throwing a lot of ink cartridges in the box and lowering the prices of replacement cartridges, no hardware changes had to be made to the printer to accommodate the ink-delivery system.

Otherwise, the MFC-J985DW XL is a mostly typical low-volume all-in-one printer, starting with its 20-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) for pushing originals to the scanner. Unfortunately, this is not an auto-duplexing ADF, meaning that it can’t scan two-sided pages automatically; doing that requires user intervention for each sheet. The print engine, on the other hand, can print two-sided documents automatically, without your help to turn the pages over to print the other side.

At 16.5 inches across, by 13.4 inches from front to back, by 6.8 inches tall, and weighing a slight 18.3 pounds, the MFC-J885DW XL is quite compact, with a low profile. In addition, it should behave quite respectfully next to you on your desk, without any notable shaking or noise while printing. It also supports Wi-Fi Direct (for connecting to the printer with your Android mobile device without either being connected to a network or router), as well as Near-Field Communication (NFC). NFC is touch-to-print functionality, in which you touch your Android phone or tablet to a hotspot on the printer, circled in red in the image below.

Some options, such as cloud printing and Wi-Fi, are set up in typical manner and are configured from the 2.7-inch touch-screen display, which in this case comprises the entire control panel, as shown here...

From here you can trigger and configure most of the printer’s functions, such as PC-free/walk-up printing, copying, and scanning, as well as connecting to various cloud sites around the Internet. Notice that the Power button and the Wi-Fi connectivity-status LED are the only two portions of the control scheme that are not actually part of the control panel. Occasionally, we found that we had to wade deep into the MFC-J985DW menu structure to find and get things done, but for most common tasks it was easy to use.

Setup

One of the advantages of setting up small all-in-ones like this is that they’re easy to get out of the box and onto your network (or connected to a single PC via USB). Comparatively speaking, the trash stack of tape and packing materials from this printer was light and all was easily removed. Getting this AIO out of the box, powered up, installing the network drivers, loading paper, installing the ink cartridges, and printing our first test page took about 20 to 30 minutes—about average for an entry-level printer.

Part of the setup process is, of course, installing the ink cartridges. As mentioned, the MFC-J985DW XL comes with three sets of four (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, or CMYK) of Brother's XL ink tanks for this printer. As you’ll see, though, it’s not these initial tanks that provide the best value; it’s not until you start purchasing the replacement cartridges that this printer starts paying off. Those savings come courtesy of the reduced prices on the cartridges. But let’s look first at the ink that comes with the printer.